Only Yesterday [Paperback]

S. Y. Agnon (Author), Barbara Harshav (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 4, 2002

Israeli Nobel Laureate S.Y. Agnon's famous masterpiece, his novel Only Yesterday, here appears in English translation for the first time. Published in 1945, the book tells a seemingly simple tale about a man who immigrates to Palestine with the Second Aliya--the several hundred idealists who returned between 1904 and 1914 to work the Hebrew soil as in Biblical times and revive Hebrew culture. Only Yesterday quickly became recognized as a monumental work of world literature, but not only for its vivid historical reconstruction of Israel's founding society. This epic novel also engages the reader in a fascinating network of meanings, contradictions, and paradoxes all leading to the question, what, if anything, controls human existence?

Seduced by Zionist slogans, young Isaac Kumer imagines the Land of Israel filled with the financial, social, and erotic opportunities that were denied him, the son of an impoverished shopkeeper, in Poland. Once there, he cannot find the agricultural work he anticipated. Instead Isaac happens upon house-painting jobs as he moves from secular, Zionist Jaffa, where the ideological fervor and sexual freedom are alien to him, to ultra-orthodox, anti-Zionist Jerusalem. While some of his Zionist friends turn capitalist, becoming successful merchants, his own life remains adrift and impoverished in a land torn between idealism and practicality, a place that is at once homeland and diaspora. Eventually he marries a religious woman in Jerusalem, after his worldly girlfriend in Jaffa rejects him.

Led astray by circumstances, Isaac always ends up in the place opposite of where he wants to be, but why? The text soars to Surrealist-Kafkaesque dimensions when, in a playful mode, Isaac drips paint on a stray dog, writing "Crazy Dog" on his back. Causing panic wherever he roams, the dog takes over the story, until, after enduring persecution for so long without "understanding" why, he really does go mad and bites Isaac. The dog has been interpreted as everything from the embodiment of Exile to a daemonic force, and becomes an unforgettable character in a book about the death of God, the deception of discourse, the power of suppressed eroticism, and the destiny of a people depicted in all its darkness and promise.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Israeli Nobel Prize-winner Agnon (1887-1970) is a founding father, like Theodor Herzl. While Herzl founded Zionism, Agnon (A Simple Story; Shira) forged the language of modern Hebrew literature. In this immense novel, first published in 1945 and now translated into English for the first time, Agnon paints the panorama of the second Aliya, or immigration, of Jews to Palestine, which occurred between the turn of the century and WWI. Isaac Kumer is a young, fervent but feckless young Zionist in the Austrian province of Galicia, whose disappointed father gives him the money to emigrate to Israel. Once Isaac reaches the Land, he becomes a housepainter. As Agnon explains, at first "his brush leads him and he doesn't lead his brush"--and the same can be said of this book's plot, which goes off on various whimsical tangents. In Jaffa, Isaac tastes his first experience of love with Sonya, a modern woman, but in Jerusalem he meets Shifra, the daughter of a strict religionist, and he is torn between the two. Sonya is an especially fascinating figure; she resembles the "modern" women in Dostoyevski's novels, whose liberation is bound up with an existential hypersensitivity that impedes any clear course of action. Impulsively, Isaac one day paints "Crazy Dog" on the back of a friendly stray. The scruffy canine then wanders around Jerusalem, causing the population to panic. This fantastical subplot "dogs" Isaac's stay in Jerusalem and is interwoven with his fate and that of Shifra's father. Agnon's novel has a folkloric quality analogous to the bold simplifications of Chagall, locating the archaic residue lurking just below the surface disenchantment of modernity. A useful introduction by Harshav informs readers about the historical background to the story and Agnon's place in 20th-century literature.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Kirkus Reviews

Never before available in English, a masterpiece of the picaresque by the Nobel laureate who is arguably the greatest novelist in modern Hebrew. Fifty-five years after this epic tales initial publication, Harshav provides an eloquent translation, successfully capturing Agnons carefully nuanced and bitter humor. A nonentity, a schlemiel named Isaac Kumer, arrives in Palestine as one of the dreamy-eyed pioneers of the Second Aliyah, the wave of Jewish immigrants who, impelled by Zionist rhetoric, came to the barren precincts of the Holy Land late in the first decade of the 20th century. Isaac, like his fellows, wants to work the land, to walk behind a plow making a desert blossom, but the hapless, feckless young Galician ends up as an itinerant sign painter instead. Over the course of the novel he drifts between women, ideologies, and influences, a sort of filial figure ``adopted'' by an entire range of Zionists, would-be socialists, and rabbis Orthodox and un-, not to mention the extraordinary Sonya, who introduces him to love and loss. Then Kumer, a holy fool of sorts, engages in a single act of childish horseplay, painting the words crazy dog on the side of a mongrel stray, that sets in motion the forces of his own destruction and simultaneously gives the work a daring, unpredictable second narrative focus. Agnon tells the story in a wildly shifting kaleidoscope of plotlines, syntaxes, tenses, and voices, with scathing satirical barbs that spare almost no one, including the author himself, leaping from third person to first-person plural to include his entire generation in Isaac's failings and foibles. Harshav's special achievement: she conveys brilliantly all of Agnon's impetuous leaps, poetic digressions, and wry satire (an achievement all the more admirable because she matches it in her translation of Amos Oz's essays on Agnon, p. 362). One of the finest novels of this century. -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 688 pages
• Publisher: Princeton University Press (March 4, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691095442
• ISBN-13: 978-0691095448
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.4 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #699,575 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

38 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Finally in English -- one of the great novels of the century, July 10, 2000

By 

D. Goldman "Fateful Reader" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Only Yesterday (Hardcover)

Agnon deserved his Nobel Prize. His most important work, Only Yesterday, casts an array of lights into the inner world of Judaism. Anyone who enjoys Bashevis Singer or Sholom Aleichem will kick themselves for the years they wasted without Agnon, who surpasses them. The translation itself is a wonder. It reproduces the Biblical style of narrative which Agnon brought to modern Hebrew literature. Agnon melds the traditional elements of Rabbinic parable and folkloric animal stories into the modern narrative of the turn-the-century Jewish settlers of Palestine. All in all, the appearance of the English translation is a great event, a must read for lovers of Jewish literature.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Pure Poetry, February 24, 2003

By 

Robert Braun (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Only Yesterday (Paperback)

"Only Yesterday" is, perhaps, Agnon's greatest work. In it, he displays the skill of a consummate novelist with the sensibilities of a poet. For those who are familiar with Hebrew poetry, particularly Biblical poetry, "Only Yesterday" conveys in English the rhythms and structure of classic Hebrew poetry while transmitting a sensual and, ultimately, tragic story. It is really not comparable to Singer; it is something far above and beyond Singer's work.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Masterful Read, February 16, 2010

By 

Eric Maroney (Trumansburg, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Only Yesterday (Paperback)

Agnon's Only Yesterday requires a close and careful reader. But the benefits of reading this novel and finishing it far out weigh the effort.

First there is the problem of translation. Agnon's Hebrew was deeply layered and rich, mining much of the long tradition of Hebrew literature in every age. Of course, a translation does not covey this. But this translation gives a sense of the faux simplicity of Agnon's Hebrew prose. Beneath the deadpan delivery is a multi-layered work that taps into a three-thousand year history of Hebrew prose writing.

Second, Agnon has produced a work that is an invaluable document about the early days of the New Yishuv in Palestine. Rich in local color and detail, Agnon is not afraid to take the reader on carefully crafted detours into the lives of the odd characters of the early Zionist movement, men and women who would resurrect a language and create a state.

Finally, Only Yesterday belongs in the pantheon of large social novels that while exemplifying a certain time and place, capture human universals. The problems of human life, the pains, joys, loves, losses, are the ultimate subject of this book. Taken together, all these elements make for a masterful read.